Online advertising was supposed to be interactive. It
was supposed to rescue us from having to force people
into looking at our ads. Consumers were going to want
to interact with us, they were going to want to have
conversations with marketers, they were going to want
to have relationships with brands.
It was all fantasies and delusions based on naive
interpretations of consumer behavior by people who had
a whole lot of ideological commitment to the web, and
very little experience with real world marketing.

I understand all those I'm quitting social
site posts, really. The open web is much more
fun, useful, and promising in the long run than
hanging out on whatever current site has taken the
place of AOL, CompuServe, and MySpace.

But, really, just quitting a site? Might be harder
than it sounds. Habits are hard to break, so here's
a list of things to help add some motivation to social
network quitteration.

Awkward friending. Every week or so,
connect with a person who isn't
really your friend, but would
find it difficult to turn you down. Be a creepy
ex-coworker. Don't spam, though.

Social marketing FAIL Find the most awful
"engaged brands" in the ads on social sites and
follow or friend them. Keep yourself from being
tempted to return to a social site by knowing that
your feed there will be full of FREE WEBINARs.

Social marketing double FAIL Befriend the most
heinous companies and astroturf organizations you
can find. The "American Sugar Alliance" and other
groups looking for corporate welfare usually do it
for me.

Klouchebaggery. Do a search for "social media
marketing" and do the first tip you find.
These change all the time, so be creative.

Open the RSS spigot. Set up an account on a
site such as dlvr.it
to automate posting your blog's feed to the social
site. Good for breaking a social networking habit.
(If you're all like, I just need to get on and
post my one blog link, and before you know
it you've been on for an hour, this is better.
And yes, dlvr.it works for me.)

The answer is almost certainly yes—unless
you're a Java programmer. It can't hurt to remove
it if you don't need it, and can probably help.

I've been running without Java on the desktop
for years. The only thing that I've needed to put
it back for has been with one extremely "legacy"
behind-the-firewall application.

There are some old corporate applications that still
depend on Java in the browser. If you're in the
situation of having to use one of those, don't mess
with the software installed on your company system,
because the IT Department probably has a required
setup that you're supposed to use, and you can just
use that. (What are you reading random blogs for?
Call your company help desk if you have questions
about that machine!)

Depending on the project and your role in it, you
might get lots of different benefits.

Learn new languages and tools to keep your skill
set current.

Practice techniques that you might not be able
to justify putting time into in a corporate
environment. (For example, coding for extreme
security or efficiency or minimum power and memory
usage.)

Make connections with people outside your company.

Signal your technical competence and ability to
work with others. Often, willingness to put time
into open source depends on the job market for
high-skill non-management programmers. The more
that the hiring process depends on formal education
and certification, and the less input it has from
peers, the less incentive that a programmer has
to Signal his or her skill using open source.

Talk with real users about bugs and features
without a company filter, to get a better
understanding of a software problem space.

The America Invents Act increases the benefits of
participating in open source in two ways.

First of all, defensive publication
becomes a much more powerful tool. The First
To Blog rule means that a blog post or other
publication is more likely to count as prior art,
since a patent applicant can't claim an earlier
invention date to beat it. Although it is possible
to do defensive publication of just documents
while keeping the code itself secret, it's less
administrative overhead to just open source as much
as possible.

AIA also provides for a challenge system, which will be
difficult for most companies to use independently.
Industry organizations will probably have a new role in
challenging patents that attack their members. The
EFF is already doing this for 3D printing
patents.

Open-source licenses require different degrees of
reciprocity from a licensee. In this list, each
license category includes the same basic terms as
the previous category. I'll leave out the corporate
vanity licenses, since they aren't typically adopted
by new projects.

No reciprocity: new BSD, MIT. These licenses simply
grant permission to copy the software, and disclaim
warranty.

Patent reciprocity: Apache. In order to redistribute
software under this license, a licensee must offer a
license to any of the licensee's patents that apply.

Partial copyright reciprocity: Mozilla Public License,
Lesser GPL. A licensee must provide source code for
changes to the original work, but can still add code
that is somehow kept distinct from the original, and
keep it proprietary.

Broad copyright reciprocity: GPL (all versions). If a
licensee distributes a modified version that
constitutes a "derivative work" for purposes of
copyright law, that derivative work must be available
in source code form.

Protections from complex legal schemes: GPLv3. Some
patent trolling schemes and code signing systems have
the effect of working around the reciprocity
requirements of the GPL. This later version of the
license closes some loopholes.

SaaS reciprocity: Affero GPL. The only commonly used
license that requires a licensee to redistribute source
even if the code is not actually redistributed.
Offering AGPL-licensed software for use over a network
also triggers the requirement to redistribute source.